Random Thoughts On Diwali

• I gave up setting off crackers almost twenty years back. But today Abhinav told me to go out on the terrace and watch other people set them off. I told him that the air is too smoky for me on Diwali evening, and I didn't want to do that, but I did, for just a little while. Now the terrace here is above the seventh floor, which is, according to Abhinav, pretty high up, and he claimed that too much smoke would not reach that high. Well, guess what? It does. I wonder why people clean their houses before Diwali. All this stuff makes my house noticeably dustier on Diwali. This week, I cleaned my room exactly the way I usually do, every Sunday. But next Sunday, it's gonna need an extra-special cleaning. On the other hand, one of my dearest friends, who usually restricts himself to cleaning the switch boards in his house, was supposedly cleaning the fans in his house before Diwali. Now these fans have been known to cause any amount of dust to fall on innocent people. Even those were cleaned for the occasion!
• One of my neighbours have put up this string of bright, shocking pink lights. There are actually these two adjacent houses with adjacent balconies, which belong to two brothers. They have strewn the pink lights across both the balconies. Now I never thought I'd say this about anything pink, but it looks horrendous. Distasteful. And it's located at a point where it's right there, in my face, when I go out into my balcony!